“In This Part of the City, All the Fellows Are Gay” is a three-part essay about the history of LGBTQ nightlife at St. Louis, 1935).Īuthor Ian Darnell is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago & graduate researcher for Mapping LGBTQ St. Source: Ralph Carr Fletcher, et al., Social Statistics of St. Louis’s Central Corridor characterized by low average family size and an unusually high proportion of unmarried adult male residents. Dante’s Inferno stood in the midst of a band stretching across St. The approximate location of Dante’s Inferno (3516 Olive) is marked with a red star. Louis, according to data from the 1930 US Census. Louis Republic called the neighborhood around Grand and Olive “a place of music and laughter and bustle and bright lights, of pretty women and carefree men.”Ī map illustrating the distribution of single men in St. Its central location and proximity to several streetcar lines and major roads made it a relatively convenient gathering place for people living throughout the St. Going back as far as the early twentieth century, this area was a busy entertainment district. It is also near the main campus of Saint Louis University. The 3500 block of Olive is in Grand Center, a neighborhood that is today home to such major cultural institutions as the Fox Theatre and Powell Hall. Image courtesy of the Missouri History Museum. All of these buildings were later demolished. Another gay bar, the Onyx Room, is out of the frame to the right.
Several popular lesbian and gay hangouts are visible: Shelley’s Midway Bar, Act IV Coffeehouse, and the Golden Gate Bar (left to right). The south side of the 3500 block of Olive in the early 1960s.